In the Heights, page 1
Copyright © 2021 by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes
New material by Lin-Manuel Miranda copyright © 2021 Lin-Manuel Miranda
Essays by Quiara Alegría Hudes copyright © 2021 Quiara Alegría Hudes
Motion Picture Photography © 2021 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved
Motion Picture Artwork © 2021 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved
“In the Heights”
Music & lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda
Book by Quiara Alegría Hudes
Conceived by Lin-Manuel Miranda
Lyrics copyright © 2008 Lin-Manuel Miranda. Published by 5000 Broadway Music (ASCAP). Administered by WC Music Corp.
Book copyright © 2013 Quiara Alegría Hudes
Story copyright © 2002 Lin-Manuel Miranda
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
“In the Heights” and related characters and elements are trademarks of 5001 Broadway Productions, LLC and Barrio Grrrl! Productions, Inc.
Additional photo credits and permissions appear on this page.
Hardback ISBN 9780593229590
Ebook ISBN 9780593339695
randomhousebooks.com
Illustrations 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16 © 2021 by Krystal Quiles
Art direction, design, and lettering by Laura Palese, adapted for ebook
Cover art and design: Laura Palese
rhid_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Heights Onscreen
Introduction
Act One
Chapter one: The Words I Need
In the Heights
Chapter two: Welcome Home
Breathe
Chapter three: Ride With Me
Benny’s Dispatch
Chapter four: Hear Me Out
It Won’t Be Long Now
Chapter five: A Thousand Games
I’m Out
Chapter six: Siempre
Inútil
Chapter seven: Freestyle
No Me Diga
Chapter eight: I Can’t Stop Dancing
96,000
Chapter nine: That Was Amazing
Paciencia y Fe
Chapter ten: I Fell in Love on a Saturday
When You’re Home
Chapter eleven: Game of Chess
Piragua
Chapter twelve: Almost home
The Club
Blackout
INTERMISSION: TONY NIGHT
Act Two
Chapter thirteen: Goodbye
Sunrise
Chapter fourteen: Stand on My Shoulders
Hundreds of Stories
Chapter fifteen: Plan B
Enough
Chapter sixteen: Everything Is Melting
Carnaval del Barrio
Chapter seventeen: Welcome to My World
Atención
Alabanza
Chapter eighteen: I Miss Your Face
Everything I Know
Chapter nineteen: Don’t Tune Me Out
Piragua (Reprise)
Chapter twenty: Fire Escape
Champagne
Chapter twenty-one: En Washington Heights
When the Sun Goes Down
Chapter twenty-two: Finale
Finale
Home All Summer
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PHOTO CREDITS
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
The Salon Ladies • The Dinner Scene • The Beach • Sonny
This book presents Lin-Manuel Miranda’s songs in the order of their appearance in the stage version of In the Heights.
To follow along with the songs as they appear in the movie—and to see some key changes that Lin made to his lyrics—read them in this order:
In the Heights
Benny’s Dispatch
Breathe
No Me Diga
It Won’t Be Long Now
96,000
Piragua
When You’re Home
The Club
Blackout
Paciencia y Fe
Alabanza
Carnaval del Barrio
When the Sun Goes Down
Champagne
Finale
Home All Summer
Piragua (reprise)
he actors took their bows, the crowd finished cheering, and everybody headed for the doors. Spotting a friend, I cut across the lobby. I asked, Did you just see what I just saw?
Or words to that effect. It’s been fourteen years, so I can’t remember exactly what I said that night. But I do remember exactly how In the Heights made me feel.
I had gone to the show from a certain sense of obligation. Back then, I was reviewing plays for New York magazine. Since I had argued repeatedly that musical theater needed to embrace a wider range of sounds and styles, duty compelled me to see a show that (according to the press release) was trying to supply them. The track record of such evenings was not stellar, to put it gently. But that night at 37 Arts, the Off-Broadway complex where Heights had its world premiere, I found what you always dream of finding.
Here was something vibrant and original. Two new writers, the composer/lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda and librettist Quiara Alegría Hudes, had used their hearts, brains, and imagination to evoke life in Washington Heights, a predominantly Latino neighborhood near the northern tip of Manhattan. They and their collaborators had created a show that was smart, moving, and skillfully staged.
In the next issue of the magazine, I heralded the show’s arrival, particularly the work of its implausibly gifted composer/lyricist. Heights had made more expansive, more sophisticated use of hip-hop than any musical that had gotten near Broadway. That would have been reason enough for a rave. But Lin also tapped into salsa and merengue—and he demonstrated an uncanny gift for writing evocative Broadway ballads. It didn’t make sense that a first-time songwriter could do so many disparate things so well. Plus he had enough charisma to play Usnavi, the bodega owner at the heart of the show.
Who was this guy?
I didn’t know. But I was happy to see his show transfer to Broadway, where it won four Tony Awards, including Best Musical. And I was glad, and not at all shocked, to see Lin’s star rise and rise (and rise and rise). After I left the magazine, Lin and I became friends, so I got to watch the ascent up close. (I saw the parabolic part, when he wrote and starred in Hamilton, from very close. We co-authored a book about the show: Hamilton: The Revolution.)
So imagine my surprise to discover, years after that night in 2007, that I hadn’t grasped the most extraordinary thing about the show after all.
ne day in 2019, Lin called with an idea: Let’s write a book about In the Heights.
The show had closed on Broadway eight years earlier, but the timing was right. Warner Bros. was turning it into a major motion picture, directed by Jon M. Chu. I liked the notion of tracing the musical’s many lives. Lin had gotten the idea for the show in college, when the prospect of it one day going to Broadway was the longest of long shots. But somehow Heights got there—and now, after many false starts and setbacks, it was making another leap to the big screen. I also liked the idea of revisiting themes and people we’d written about in our earlier book. It would be a kind of sequel, even though a lot of the action takes place before Hamilton. Like The Godfather Part II, but in a bodega.
It was only when I started doing interviews—more than fifty, by the end—that I came to see the extraordinary thing I hadn’t discerned in 2007. Again and again, people said that working on Heights felt different from other jobs. They described growing closer to colleagues on this show than on other projects—and keeping those bonds for years. It came to feel, they said, like a family.
Now, let’s be clear. I, like you, have read a celebrity profile. I have watched a morning talk show. I find people talking about “family” in show business to be just as corny and clichéd as you do. That’s why I didn’t take full account of what I heard about family in the first few interviews. But once I heard it a dozen times, then two dozen—once I heard it from people who had no connection to the original production, from actors and directors who staged the show all around the world; once I heard people who were making the movie say that the tight bond they’d forged with their colleagues was absolutely the most valuable part of the experience, even though the experience hadn’t yet ended—I started to think, Maybe there’s something here.
What’s the source of this strange adhesive power? People first felt it, and tried to explain it, twenty-two years ago. They are still trying. As this book traces the unlikely journey of In the Heights from Lin’s undergraduate brain to Broadway to Hollywood, it considers some of the ways that this musical has made people feel differently about themselves and the folks around them—how the depiction of a community can give rise to a community.
Like the Hamilton book, the story proceeds along parallel tracks. My chapters trace episodes in the development of In the Heights: first the stage version, then the film. (Though as you’ll see, the development of the stage version is a huge part of the development of the film. In order for Leslie Grace to sing “Breathe” onscreen, Mandy Gonzalez had to sing it onstage—and that could only happen after Lin had composed and rejected countless other songs that might have introduced Nina Rosario, a character that he and Quiara spent years fashioning out of their lives, dreams, and writerly imaginations. The pot is always bubbling.) Lin’s annotations to his lyrics reveal where his songs came from and what they mean to him. In many cases he is reflecting on work he did many years ago. So are his collaborators, when they’re quoted in the chapters. That long reach back through time is one of the reasons we wanted to do the book. It’s a chance to hear artists at the highest ranks of their professions contemplate what they did, and who they were, when they were still learning to fly.
One big difference between this book and the Hamilton book reflects a difference between the shows. Hamilton is sung through, so the song lyrics capture virtually every word of the script. But Heights has dialogue scenes, which Quiara wrote for the stage version, then rewrote significantly for the movie. Since it wasn’t possible to include two full scripts in the book, she wrote essays about a handful of key moments in the story. Each one traces her creative process from inspiration to stage version to screen. Think of these essays as the stitches that bind the lives of Heights together.
(The order of the songs, like the dialogue, changed between Broadway and the film version. We’ve kept the order from the stage version; the lyrics printed here follow the original Broadway cast album. But if you want to read Lin’s annotations as you watch the movie, look at the second table of contents, on page viii. It lists the songs in their movie order and will tell you where to turn next.)
One last feature of the book takes its inspiration from the show. In “Everything I Know,” Nina, the neighborhood’s wayward Stanford student, looks through a scrapbook created by Abuela Claudia, the community matriarch. By revisiting images from her past, Nina gains a new understanding of who she is and what she ought to do. Scattered throughout this book, you’ll find recuerdos, reproductions of images and objects preserved by artists involved in Heights. The word “recuerdo” captures their character more fully than any word in English. It means “memento,” but it also means “I remember.” It implies not just recollection, but tribute. The recuerdos weren’t chosen on the basis of intrinsic historical significance. They’re here because they meant something special to a member of the Heights community. In the text that accompanies the images, the artists share that meaning in their own words.
n early 2020, Lin Quiara, and I had nearly finished our book. All that remained was a final chapter about the movie’s world premiere, which was set for June. But people began to fall ill: first far away, then painfully close to home. COVID-19, sweeping around the world, put American life on hold. It led Warner Bros. to delay the movie’s release until after our intended publication date that fall.
The fact that a virus could spread around the planet so rapidly underscores the final reason to tell this story. Our world is in motion. Social scientists say that in the twenty-first century, people will pick up their lives and—out of choice or necessity—start over in greater numbers than ever before. In this Age of Migration, they will need to learn how to live in new places and assert their dignity among new neighbors, far from the habits and customs they’ve known. All of them will try to turn unfamiliar places into home.
A vast capacity for helping people to feel that they belong—that’s the quality that most distinguishes In the Heights. This book is an account of gifted artists telling a story about home—and making one.
“Okay,” says Lin-Manuel Miranda. “I’m going to tell you the very painful origin story of In the Heights.”
He smiles as he says it. He’s not joking; it’s just that he’s telling a story that happened a long time ago and a long way away. His college, Wesleyan University, is a hundred miles from where he sits, in his dressing room at a Broadway theater. It seems a lot farther than that, when you consider what’s happened in the meantime.
The Lin who is telling the story, a few weeks shy of his fortieth birthday, is the winner of almost every award that an American artist can win, a movie star, and a MacArthur-certified genius. (In a few hours, he’ll step onstage in Freestyle Love Supreme to Beatlemania squeals.) The Lin who was living the story, a few weeks shy of his twentieth birthday, was a sophomore dreaming distantly of becoming a writer (or maybe an actor—or a director?) and nursing a serious talent crush.
The crush is what makes the story painful.
M. Graham Smith—who went by his legal first name, Matt, at the time—was one of Wesleyan’s star directors. “The senior god,” according to Lin. His work was more sophisticated than anything else on campus. When Lin learned that Matt had started a program called Playwrights Attic to develop new works by student writers, Lin asked if he could take part.
“Sure,” Matt said. Which was all the encouragement Lin needed.
Lin had written short musicals in high school, but now he wanted to do something more ambitious: a full-length show that would reflect his world. His head hadn’t stopped spinning from seeing Rent two years earlier. Jonathan Larson’s musical gave him permission to write a story about young people, in the present day, using popular music. Only Lin’s show wouldn’t lean on rock music the way Rent had. If he was going to capture the sound of Washington Heights, the world of his youth, he would need salsa and hip-hop.
No one had ever done a show like that before. Which was one of the reasons to do it.
As Lin generated material, he shared it with Matt. In 1999, that meant singing it into Matt’s answering machine.
“What do you think?” Lin would say.
Matt was unfailingly encouraging. “You make an audience feel so taken care of,” he told Lin.
“And I’ll never forget the compliment,” Lin says twenty years later, “because it’s something I still aspire to.”
A few weeks later, Matt assembled a trio of actors, led them through some rehearsals, and made arrangements for a late-night reading at the 92 Theater. In that converted library, a few dozen students gathered for the world’s first taste of what Lin had titled In the Heights.
Or a bit of it, anyway: It had only two songs—it ran only twenty minutes. But it excited the people who saw it.
Encouraged by the response, Lin went on writing and sharing with Matt. One night, they met up at the Wesleyan student center (which is like every student center—the microwave, the mail room). Lin said he wanted to apply to do the show in the spring semester—not a staged reading this time but a full-fledged musical, with sets and lights and choreography, and naturally with Matt directing.
Even now, twenty years later, Matt can see the expression on Lin’s face—the look of disappointment—when Matt said no.
It was the only answer he could give. He was about to graduate, he had to finish his thesis, he couldn’t direct a new musical, especially one about a world as foreign to him as Washington Heights.
“That’s awful,” Lin said. He asked if they could shift things around, find some wiggle room. But they couldn’t. It was “just the worst timing it could have been,” Matt says.
Lin hadn’t seen that coming. He was crushed, he says, “but understanding.”
Many things might have happened next. Lin could have given up. He could have waited. He could have looked for someone else to tell the story. Instead, he made what seems, in light of everything that has happened since then, like one of the most consequential decisions of his life.
Two hours later, by his recollection, he called his friend, the stage manager Anne Macri. He told her he still wanted to do the show.
And not only that: “I think I’m directing it.”
in must have taken classes that spring, but he doesn’t remember them. What he remembers is writing a show and figuring out how to stage it.
“It was a stressful thing,” says Owen Panettieri, a friend who took part in the first short reading. “It was his creation and he was directing.”
